Midnight Journal Entry

something that is nothing, and the prelude to a migration

Everything I do is half-finished these days: journal entries, laundry loads, one hundred and forty-eight Substack drafts, six double-sided page letters to friends, nights of sleep. I feel caught perpetually between the doing and the undoing, the doing and the re-doing. I am the woman who unstitches by night the tapestry she wove by day. I know how to be in liminal spaces, but do I know how to be once I step out of them? Slowly the murmurs of the grave I am walking towards reach my ears, and I begin to wonder with some discomfiture if between such small things as tooth enamel and the flight of house-trapped bats I will not see any legacy built except two hundred and eighty thousand hours of undoing.

We are not meant to take census of our seconds; I am certain of that. Yet here we are; we live in a world where we can reach for a black mirror and find in it the minutes ticking down to our four score and ten. We can gaze into the middle distance and find there a trillion self-replicating mirages of screaming dust smothered feverish choking weeping flailing humans and never feel in our bodies the weight of being born or the weight of dying. There’s an app for that—there’s a drug for that—and the greater the intensity the body experiences the faster the needle arrives.

Ah, I remember all too well the other twin, the trash chute, the calm and friendly way with which the algorithm chose the survivor. Except that wasn’t a life I lived in my body, was it? That was Lois Lowry in a world drained of all saturation. That was a small cipher, machine-pressed on pages gifted by the evisceration of some far-off tree whose life was also sorted by algorithm. That was a model of our culture’s version of the Receiver, and the fact that we keep our collective memory in books instead of bodies is why the burning of a book feels like the burning of a soul.

My son is obsessed with numbers. He traces them upside down, left handed. “Top down,” I remind him. We lie side by side at night, my arm under his head per his oft-repeated request, and he drills me in addition. Then multiplication. I like these problems much better than the ones he brought to bed a year ago, when he would whimper quietly with his arms round my neck and say “but I don’t want you to die.” Then the recent memory of an unstoppable force (irrepressible Zeke the Havanese) meeting an immovable object (a fast moving Jeep) was all too recently buried in the south corner of the garden, and his spirit leaned into our garden-facing bedroom window with disquieting frequency.

If someone had managed to impress upon me beforehand how much my child’s grief would twist my heart, I do not think I would have been brave enough to become his mother.

There is part of me which for many years felt unable to avoid the labyrinthian demands of each role held, switching between them and becoming an entirely different woman. Each required a different expression of me and never the twain should meet. The edges between them all are blurring now; perhaps the slow creep towards middle age is actually the process of the many becoming one. I like the aging process when it is written with such a definition, when the pasted together images I have of myself peel away and start to show a single unified body beneath the oft-scattered exterior. The daughter and the mother, the lover, the professional, the needy animal—how tenaciously they share a single skin, a single brain, a single kaleidoscope of cell and spirit and the animation of electrical impulse.

There is a part of me unreconciled to the way personhood has been stapled at every edge to the demand of the market economy. I would like not to struggle financially; I do not want to show up in a life where two teeth can snap apart in one week and an empty bank account means no recourse for repair. I do not have any desire to model my life after the one I have been living. But neither do I consent to every part of who I am being measured through whether it is worth purchasing. I wish the opportunity had never arrived to have one’s net worth measured in revenue. Back to the numbers again. I know what I can make in one hour doing one thing and what I can make in an hour doing another, and loving someone else is a third thing entirely: it produces a direct dollar value of exactly zero.

Every day I wake up, look in the mirror, and shred the census form that arrived overnight, delivered discreetly through the crack in the back door of the mind.

Someone asked me casually to work for no fee the other day, as if it would be a favor for me, and I realized I was in every sense unwilling. “You want me to pay for your care with my teeth,” I could have said. Instead I said “I’m not able to gift you care at this time.” The thing about favor-making is that it requires mutuality across time, and a delicate intimacy with the cost of the thing on the part of the giver. I wondered if they would have even understood about the teeth, or if they might have thought me a ungenerous. The thing is, there are many things with which I desire to be generous, but my teeth are not among them, not when they are asked to be spent in exchange for a glamorous act of consumption over laborious mutual care. Nor do I desire to be generous in giving away what time I have left with my child. Miser I am and miser I will be. That label, too, might disintegrate in the constellated unity found in this articulation of flesh and bone.

I titled this newsletter The Mother Letters and that title now feels like ill-fitted apparel. I am not here to teach or assemble or fit one tidy presentation or talk only of birth-work or child-rearing. The name which actually fits is something more along the lines of “Scribbles from a House Built on Thin Places”, which is another way of saying “Diary of a Woman Rooted In Liminal Space”. I want to write about birth politics and health education and the art of living as creature and creator, yes, but I also want to write different things—things that the professional does not own to having written but that the woman as a whole cannot live without writing. Things that feel less like the abstraction of thought and more like a slow disrobing. One cannot write in such a fashion if one has first identified as a role and secondly as a human.

Because of so often standing in those thin places, waiting for what can happen to happen, there is something of the twilight zone forever hovering over daily life. There is a cost to being attuned always to the what ifs, just as there is a cost to being attuned to the dollar value of one’s work or the countdown of one’s days. I work with bodies and ideas about bodies and relationships between bodies and theories about how to manage bodies and sculpt bodies and communicate with bodies. In that process there is something of disembodiment, something of the remote and self-censuring observer. I wonder about that place as onlooker and the endless rhythm between the brain and the hands when I lie next to my son for a solid hour at night, when he slides up until his head is between my shoulder and my chin and breathes his whole lungful into my ear. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he asks me over and over again. “What are YOU thinking, buddy?” I ask him in reply.

“You really are the warmest thing I’ve ever had.”